Road Rage Trails in Consumer Reports Survey

When Consumer Reports conducted research for its 2015 road rage survey, published on December 31 last year, the magazine included for the first time questions about other forms of rage that sully our lives.

“Road rage gets the headlines because it’s more sexy than other kinds of rage,” said Edward Bennett, CR’s director of consumer research, “but to focus on road rage is to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to other, potentially more harmful, kinds of rage.”

Indeed, as Consumer Reports learned, road rage isn’t the biggest wedgie in your average American posterior. Many people, for example, listed Verizon’s-Crappy-Actiontec-Router Rage as the most annoying sage of all.

Picture yourself in your lounge chair sailing into the denouement of the George Gently season-six finale on Acorn TV when all of a sudden the twirling-sphincter image appears on your television screen, accompanied by a “buffering/reloading” message. You wait hopefully for several seconds, then for the third time this week you trudge two rooms over to reset that crappy Actiontec router Verizon provides its customers.

Other people listed Empty-Handicapped-Parking-Spaces Rage as the most murderous rage going. We’ve all been there, countless times. It’s pouring rain and every damn parking space within sprinting distance of the restaurant is taken except for the half dozen empty handicapped-parking spaces nearest the entrance, sitting there thumbing their noses at you with their prosthetic arms. You and your chipper have to run through the monsoon and then eat in soggy clothes while the handicapped weasels stay dry at home, ordering in from Grub Hub.

If you are a real sports fan, you are probably familiar with Too-Much-Soccer-Coverage-on-ESPN Rage. You tune into Sports Center, hoping to catch the highlights of Anthony Davis dropping fifty-nine on the Pistons, but before you can enjoy that epic performance, you have to endure extended coverage of a bunch of foreign-born chaps in short pants kicking a stupid ball around—as if anybody but the Euro-trash-worshipping suits at ESPN gives a defecation about that.

Technology, food, and sports are not the only sources of non-vehicular rage. Politics, too, can jack up the blood pressure, especially when Donald Trump’s name is invoked. One expects the leafy types at MSNBC and CNN to be pooping themselves over Donald’s postmodern, no-insults-barred march to the Republican presidential nomination; but this more-aggrieved-than-thou posturing is infuriating when it comes from National Review and other alleged guardians of right thinking.

In politics as in life: nothing matters, and what if it did? Trump gives a case of the backdoor emissions to the likes of Rachel Maddow. For that alone he deserves to be president.

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